An A to Z of the Sad State of Us

I saw Boy A last night and now I can't get the damn thing out of my head. (Readers of a sensitive disposition stop now.)

It concerns the release after detention of a young man who was imprisoned as a child for the killing - with another boy - of another child; in this case it's a girl of about their own age, but otherwise the situation clearly parallells the killing of Jamie Bulger.

The point about Boy A is that he has grown up a decent hardworking well-intentioned lad, burdened with guilt and fear about his past, but apparently exemplary in his present. This, too, mirrors the Jamie Bulger case.

Where the film is different from most of the press on the case, is that it takes up Boy A's story - we are invited to identify with him, to see his childhood, to sympathise with his rehabilitation and attempts to make a normal life after his release. The press and the legal system notably did not take this line about the perpetrators in reality; in 2001 when the boys came up for parole, there were still numerous calls for them to be "punished" longer, for them never to be released, endless appeals about the feelings of the dead child's mother, endless demands that they should suffer, that revenge should be somehow exacted.

The film is amazing - not because of its perfect script, which actually seemed to me beautiful in scene and dialogue, but flawed in structure, but because of the compelling conviction of both the lead and the director; the viewer is lead to care about Boy A a lot more than s/he does about the vast majority of "good" characters on tv. We see him as a victim as a child and a trier as an adult, and we hope for the best for him. We hope for his salvation; I did, anyway.

The trouble with the film is that it skates over the horror of the original crime, but at the end of it that is still where one's mind returns; to the murder of a two year old which was a bloody, panicky, horrible killing, which nobody stopped, and which afterwards was too awful to accept. What breaks your heart about it is the feeling that it could so easily not have happened. It would have been so easy for somebody to say something, to stop them; it would have been so easy for his mother not to be distracted for that single moment; it would have been so easy, for so long, for them to go back, to leave him at a police station or on somebody's doorstep, and for it to have had another, better ending.

But it happened, and so did the curious response of the UK press and legal system. I call it curious because it is almost unique in the annals of the press that neither the parents of any of the parties nor the social workers were blamed. On this occasion, the two children stood alone. They were tried as adults, though clearly unable to understand much of what was going on - something I believe would be forbidden by European law now - and their identities were made known to the press, although only ten years old at the time. Both boys had a catalogue of victim survival that would make an angel weep, and a probation officer feel no surprise at all. Between them they racked up bullying, school failure, neglect, violence and sexual abuse. The Home Secretary wanted to imprison them for thirty years, in defiance of all legal precedent and guidelines of the time. And 17 years later, people still bay for blood.

And it is because we cannot be free of it. What I remember, what I always remember, is the idea of the last part of Jamie Bulger's life. Not the two years before, when he must have been an ordinary and often happy child, but the awful last afternoon, which replays and which I empathise with so strongly that I imagine his pain and confusion as my own, amplified by my adult, external sympathy, the hope that - like the car keys you just locked in the car, like the dreadful truth you just articulated, like the mistake you knew you were making - the tape will rewind and time will allow this one correction, this one time. And that little boy is gone now; there is no likelihood, in any religion in the world, nor outside of one either, that he can be suffering any longer. It is the living who are trapped in that last corridor of horrible time; it is we who re-live it; strange that we cannot forgive the people who perpetrated it, because surely they are right there as well, only worse, with memory instead of imagination. I suppose we cannot forgive them, because they did it to us; and perhaps we haven't the last quarter inch of generosity to realise truly, in our hearts, that they what they have done to us, they have done to themselves as well.